Kishida punts on a snap election

Kishida's hand is weak, but there are forebodings of bigger changes

Source: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan

There is a certain art to the timing of a snap election. It is perhaps the most powerful tool available to a prime minister, a key mechanism by which prime ministers can discipline unruly ruling party backbenchers or marshal public opinion to win a mandate on a controversial policy question. But it is a tool that must be wielded with subtlety. Call a snap election too early and party discipline could slacken well before, say, a party leadership election. Wait too long, say, until the House of Representatives nears the end of its four-year lifespan, and it loses its potency as a threat. Call it for frivolous reasons – but at a moment of maximal political advantage – and risk public disapproval for wasting the public’s time for purely opportunistic reasons.

After weeks of grappling with the question of whether to call a snap election shortly after the ordinary session of the Diet closes, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio indicated on Thursday, 15 June that he would not be calling a snap election in the near term, what the Asahi Shimbun says is an unusually clear statement from a prime minister regarding his intentions.

Attention will now turn to whether Kishida will call a snap election in the fall. Other things being equal, an autumn general election has made more sense than a summer general election, being closer to the LDP leadership election in September 2024 and at a more conventional time in the lifespan of the current parliamentary term.¹ What might have been good for LDP backbenchers – who thought G7 tailwinds might make for an easier campaign – was not necessarily good for Kishida, who would lose his best tool for controlling the party with more than a year left in his term.

But it does not appear to have been a decision made from a position of strength. New polls released over the weekend suggest that Kishida’s bump from the G7 summit in Hiroshima has all but vanished. In the Mainichi Shimbun, his net approval dropped by twenty-four points, as his cabinet’s approval rating fell by twelve and its disapproval rose by twelve, reaching 33% and 58% respectively. In Asahi, it was a more modest eight-point drop, but disapproval has passed approval again. Similarly, Kyodo’s poll recorded an 11.9-point drop in net approval, with disapproval passing approval. Meanwhile, LDP internal polling conducted earlier this month reportedly showed that the LDP could lose forty-two seats and Kōmeitō nine, a significant blow to the coalition that perhaps could be even worse (see below). The prime minister, who looked unstoppable coming out of the summit, looks vulnerable again.

The shifting political landscape

However, his decision to shelve a snap election now may also reflect a growing awareness that the tectonic plates of Japanese politics may be shifting, further complicating Kishida’s efforts to secure his political future.

First, the long decade of opposition irrelevance – the “one strong, many weak” party system that marked the Abe years – may be nearing an end. After its strong performance in the spring local elections, Ishin no Kai is looking like a more formidable national challenger for the LDP. The party plans a considerable expansion in the number of candidates it will field across the country, including candidates in Tokyo’s thirty single-member districts, five of them new as a result of redistricting.

The party, which has surpassed the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) in polling, is aiming to supplant the CDP as the leading opposition party – and thus has decisively rejected coordination with the CDP to unify the non-LDP vote. In a Nikkei poll in late April, 51% of respondents said that they were hopeful about Ishin as the leading opposition party; only 27% said the same about the CDP. By delaying a snap election, Kishida has given Ishin more time to recruit candidates, which could hurt not only the CDP, but also the LDP and Kōmeitō. The party says it already has 120-130 candidates ready and just held a candidate training academy that attracted 710 applicants and ultimately had 551 participants. CDP grandees, including Okada Katsuya and Ozawa Ichirō, are trying hard to find a way to coordinate with Ishin, presumably both for reasons of self-preservation for themselves and their party but also because strategic coordination between opposition parties is still a more viable way to challenge the LDP. It is unclear whether Ishin will be willing to accept a partnership with the CDP at all (perhaps on the basis that Ishin is the senior partner).

To be sure, it is also unclear whether Ishin can bring out independents and disaffected supporters of other opposition parties – as well as cutting into the ruling coalition’s vote – outside of Osaka and the greater Kansai region, where it has dominated recent elections. But it is better positioned to expand into a national second party than any time before.

Cracks in the ruling coalition

At the same time, the cracks in the quarter-century-old coalition between the LDP and Kōmeitō have begun to show. The proximate trigger for intra-coalitional strife is a dispute over the coalition’s approach to coordination in Tokyo in lights of its expanded parliamentary representation. The Tokyo LDP announced it would support candidates in twenty-nine of thirty constituencies; Kōmeitō wanted the LDP to field twenty-eight, leaving it two constituencies. In response, Kōmeitō said it would not endorse any LDP candidates in Tokyo, would not cooperate with the LDP in any elections in Tokyo, and would not cooperate with the LDP in the metropolitan assembly. (NHK has a lengthy backgrounder here.) Both parties have sought to downplay the rift, suggesting that the parties will continue to coordinate elsewhere.

But this dispute seems pregnant with meaning. First, as Japan’s shrinking population continues to move to Tokyo and other major cities, the battle for urban seats will become more intense, not least since Ishin no Kai has squeezed both members of the ruling coalition in Osaka. Marginal urban seats are going to be major prizes, and more competitive battles over them are likely.

Second, this dispute may also reflect a weaker Kōmeitō, which could encourage power grabs by both the national LDP and its local chapters. Both have benefited from the coalition: Kōmeitō has been able to punch far above its weight in policy deliberations, while the LDP has been able to rely on Kōmeitō’s volunteers and voters to elect its candidates. As Adam Liff and Ko Maeda estimate in their 2019 article on the coalition in the Japanese Journal of Political Science, it is possible that roughly 30% of all LDP candidates elected from single-member constituencies since 2000 owe their victories to Kōmeitō support.

But even as LDP candidates have continued to depend on Kōmeitō, the party’s electoral base has been aging and shrinking. Compared with 2005, when its vote total in proportional representation voting reached 8.98 million, Kōmeitō gathered only 7.11 million votes in the 2021 general election and 6.18 million in the 2022 upper house elections.² If Kōmeitō’s electoral machine is less capable of delivering for LDP candidates, the Tokyo LDP is probably not the last LDP chapter to try to change the terms of the partnership. Even if the national parties try to preserve their coalition – as long as Kōmeitō remains flexible on policy and still provides some value for LDP candidates it is hard to see the LDP deliberately breaking it – friction at the prefectural and local level could diminish the effectiveness of electoral cooperation and complicate top-down efforts to manage the relationship.³

In the immediate term, however, the dispute between the parties in Tokyo created another obstacle to a snap election for Kishida. Kōmeitō leader Yamaguchi Natsuo’s warned Kishida against a snap election in immediate term – reminding the prime minister of his party’s role in maintaining the government’s majority – suggesting that going into an election without more confidence between the two coalition partners could be harmful to the LDP’s prospects.⁴ LDP heavyweights in Tokyo would certainly prefer more time to heal the rift between the parties rather than face an election within the month.⁵

It is still possible that between now and September 2024, the familiar conditions from the Abe years reassert themselves. The Ishin no Kai bubble could burst, and the non-LDP parties simply prevent each other from winning; LDP and Kōmeitō leaders could mend their coalition; the prime minister could redirect public attention to accomplishments in foreign and economic policy. Kishida may look weakened now, but he still has the snap election card and the winds can change quickly. But it is undeniable that in the drama surrounding Kishida’s non-decision on a snap election, there are glimmers of bigger structural changes in the Japanese political system.

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Quick notes

• In Yamaguchi prefecture, where redistricting will reduce the number of constituencies from four to three, Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa prevailed over former Shimonoseki mayor Yoshida Shinji – who won the late Abe Shinzō’s seat in the April by-elections – in the dispute with the Abe faction over who should be the LDP’s candidate in the new third district. Yoshida will run as a PR candidate, although his supporters – and presumably Abe’s former supporters – are not necessarily happy with the decision. (Yomiuri)

• In leaving the Bank of Japan’s easing policies unchanged, BOJ Governor Ueda Kazuo sounded cautious notes in his press conference following the bank’s policy board meeting, stressing his belief that Japan’s price increases are largely cost-push inflation and warning that there are risks to normalizing monetary policy too quickly. (NHK)

• On Friday, 16 June, the Kishida cabinet approved the 2023 Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Policy and Reform, aka the honebuto (pdf). Of note in the honebuto is that, after consultations with the ruling parties, the document – which will guide budget deliberations through the remainder of the year – suggests that it is possible that tax hikes to pay for defense spending increases could wait until 2025 or later, a concession to the LDP’s defense hawks/fiscal doves. (Nikkei)

• The cabinet also approved a 2023 revision to the Kishida government’s “grand design for the new capitalism,” basically the Kishida government’s answer to the Abe government’s annual growth strategies (pdf). Robert Feldman, senior advisor at Morgan Stanley MUFG, told Nikkei that he “gets the impression that there is a lack of concrete measures as to what goals will be achieved when.” (Nikkei)

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1. Of the twenty-six postwar general elections, only one was held when the term expired. Fifteen were held in the final year of the term, including five held in the final six months of a parliamentary term. This group includes the 2021 general election, although it is a little ambiguous: the House of Representatives was dissolved a week before its term expired but the new election was held after it would have expired. Of the remaining thirteen, seven were held in the third year of the parliamentary term, four in the second, and only two within the first year. In other words, if Kishida were to call a snap election before October, it would be only the fifth general election since 1945 called during the second year of a parliamentary term.

2. Analyst Ōhamazaki Kitakuma takes a granular look at Kōmeitō’s support in Tokyo local elections to illustrate this phenomenon, and notes the party’s aging electoral base: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/byline/oohamazakitakuma/20230506-00348397.

3. And that is before considering what Sōka Gakkai, Kōmeitō’s parent organization, intends for the party’s long-term future.

4. It probably does not help that Kishida is widely reputed to have weak ties with the junior coalition partner.

5. Perhaps it is not surprising that against this backdrop, Hagiuda Kōichi, one of those vulnerable Tokyo incumbents, criticized the Kishida government for lacking a sense of local communities.